The American journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, interviewing Adolf Hitler before WW II, captured the German Führer, who after he introduced himself in German, with a motion to the throngs that awaited him, began speaking: “Tell the Americans that life moves forward, always forward, irrevocably forward.”

Was Hitler a progressive or conservative? Certainly a difficult and irritating question which cannot be answered straight forwardly - however it symbolizes how much blurred the features of Western progress have become. The aim of this essay is to separate those blurred features by tracing them back to their roots in antiquity, and in the process referring to Jerusalem or Judaism with the same confidence that we invest in Athens and Greek philosophy.

Self-confidence is needed to propel nations from the past into the future.

As we look back and around, myths appear to be a reoccurring product of all communities, civilizations, nations and religions. This is so because of our addiction to explanations that can create “order” amidst the seeming capriciousness of man’s experiences. This craving for certainty and their incessant repetition sustains myths so that their illusions serve as substitute truths.

Not surprisingly, also our present kowtows to articles of faith that serve as palliatives and as reassurances of lived collective morality. At present, a significant one of the species is that the encounter between cultures leads to their convergence and that the result is their mutual enrichment. This tale of Green – Left vintage not only ignores reality but also replaces it with an illusion. The concept is that, in the meeting between the rocket scientist and a shaman that invokes the rain god, the involved parties are equal. For that reason, it is incumbent upon the scientist to “show respect” and to adapt. It is rated as racist cultural chauvinism to entertain the thought that if this happens, the rockets might stay on the parched ground.

Today’s issue of depreciating childhood dovetails perfectly with my previous installment on infantilizing adults: both are reflecting a loss of the sense of maturity and responsibility in our Western culture. For instance, today every newborn is burdened with a four to six figure number of debt depending on his or her whereabouts ( cf. David Willets; “The Pinch – How the Baby Boomers took their Children’s Future-and why they should give it back”, Atlantic Books London: 2010, p.259, 269). Now the first dramatic example of instrumentalizing childhood was the Bohemian version of the Dreyfus affair. In Prague it was the Jewish cobbler Leopold Hilsener who was falsely accused of ritual murder. A little Christian girl called Anezka Hruzova had been found dead on the 1.4.1899 in Polna. And it was the first Czech president after gaining independence in 1921, Professor T.G. Masaryk, who made is name with the revision of the court indictment finally exonerating Hilsener. Nevertheless since then the West is drifting towards a gradual and not merely symbolical - think of child rape and “pedophilia”- reversal of the Abrahamic abolition of child sacrifice.

There are developments that do not fit your anticipations if you are socialized by Western values. Reality and our cultural assumptions can clash. Several postulates that are said to be mankind’s goals only express local cultural preferences. Their summary would be a sentence about “liberty”, the “pursuit of happiness” and “self-evident”.

True, the order that produced these concepts has been sufficiently successful to justify emulation. However, it does not follow that the way of the achievers is predestined to become a guideline for all of mankind. We may add that, the worldwide differences in wealth and rights reflect this. The rejection of the values that advanced societies hold to be universal explains global differences in achievement. The attitude expressed through this rebuff reveals why much of mankind remains unfree, badly governed, and poor.

I. Introduction. No area of Western history is quite as recondite as that of the Diadochic empires, the successor-kingdoms that sprang up in the wake of Alexander the Great’s meteoric campaigns (334 – 323 BC) to subdue the world under militaristic Hellenism. One knows that the unity of Alexander’s Imperium, ever tenuous and improvisatory, broke down immediately on his death, when his “companions” fell to bellicose squabbling over bleeding chunks of the whole. Of Ptolemy’s Macedonian Egypt, one knows something – largely because the realm’s newly built Greek metropolis, Alexandria, became culturally the most important polis in the Mediterranean world, even after Octavian conquered Cleopatra and organized her Macedonian rump-state into Rome’s emergent world-federation. To transit from historical fair-certainty to historical incertitude, however, requires only that one switch focus from the Ptolemaic kingdom in the Nile Delta to the Seleucid... Indeed, to the Seleucid what? For Seleucus’ prize in the wars of the successors stretched in geographic space from Syria and Cilicia, and associated insular territories, eastward through portions of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor into the hinterlands of Parthia and Bactria. The Seleucid kingdom’s borders, as distinct from those of the more stable Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt, remained, like the Heraclitean river, in constant flux; moreover, the Seleucid kingdom steadily withdrew in the direction of the sunrise, sacrificing its westerly regions for the defensibility of its easterly keeps, until in its last act, as the remnant Greco-Bactrian principality, it attempted to perpetuate itself against political mortality by an exodus-through-conquest from Central Asia across the Hindu Kush into Northern India.

There is a wisdom that Duly Noted likes to repeat. Quite often, their most despicable members define communities. This is a likely outcome as we notice the “bad ones” first. This expresses an evolutionary trait that helps us to avoid danger. Furthermore, “good news is no news” makes us emphasize the negative. No conversation is made about good weather. Most Letters to the Editor are gripes. When have you thanked a tour operator for a perfect trip?

In a past article, I already discussed some issues of Islamic civilization which we are apt to neglect in our analysis of the current situation in the Middle East. Obviously, the potential force of democracy to conquer once primitive countries has been greatly overestimated; nobody will disagree anymore on that count. However, the explanations for this failure of democracy vary a lot, and quite independent of the political alignment of the commentators: it appears that all shades of opinion are quite confused by what is happening in countries recently “liberated” by the Arab Spring. The main reason for this confusion, as I stated before, is that most people in the west do not understand the wider civilizational questions involved: first, can we equate any popular uprising with an ideologically inspired revolution, but second, and most importantly, can revolutions in the Islamic world ever resemble those in the West and why are we so sure that the Islamic pattern of history must correspond to the earlier Western? The first point has been conceded by many observers, albeit implicitly and not in wider historical context, since today the dominant opinion is that these countries were not “ripe” for democracy and that popular rule does not necessarily imply democracy as we understand it in the west. The second point requires more insight, and is not even addressed by most commentators or journalists, although in fact to pose the question of essential differences in culture is not at all new; indeed, it only implies further investigation of the popular thesis Samuel Huntington developed about the “clash of civilizations”. But since western nations have lived in peace for over sixty years now, and we tend to believe that the whole world potentially is a prosperous and peaceful place like the western nation states, the concept of wholly different civilizations has become quite incomprehensible to most opinion makers. Nevertheless, we shall see it is essential to understand the ordeal the Muslim world is currently going through.

In Assignment in Utopia (1937), Eugene Lyons offers what were at the time perhaps the best eye-witness accounts of Stalinism as a state religion. He was UPI's journalist in Moscow during the early years of Stalin's rule (1928-34), which coincided with Stalin's first Five Year Plan, and, despite all we have learned since then, his first-hand observations remain both vivid and strange to this day. Among several websites that I chose at random, for example, all give 1928 -1932 as the official dates of the plan, but none comments on the transformation of five years into four. Lyons literally saw how it happened. In his chapter "Two Plus Two Equals Five," he describes the frenzied proclamations of the arithmetic that would later appear as an instrument of psychological torture in George Orwell's 1984:

Optimism ran amuck. Every new statistical success gave another justification for the coercive policies by which it was achieved. Every setback was another stimulus to the same policies. The slogan "The Five Year Plan in Four Years" was advanced, and the magic symbols "5-in-4" and "2+2=5" were posted and shouted throughout the land... . Under their pseudo-scientific exterior of charts and blueprints the planners were mystics in a trance of ardor.

Much to his ultimate peril, the contemporary suffers from a weakness; he is inclined to believe anything as long as it is not obvious. Even more frequently, if facing a new encroachment that is shrewdly kept incremental, we nod assuming that it is a final and not an initial demand. Public affairs are not analyzed the way of chess players do: those think several steps beyond their move. This explains the regular rise of temporary levies that become permanent while their promised small burden mutes into millstones.

In accordance with this pattern, a new stealthy attack on private property and the soundness of advanced economic systems is constructed.

Is European civil war inevitable? Increasingly the question is posed these days not only by those who were in the past labeled alarmists and political amateurs, but by all sorts of people who are waking up to the disconcerting aspects of Muslim immigration in Europe. At first thought, predicting civil war would indeed still sound somewhat irresponsible to many westerners, especially the middle and upper classes who have retreated in pleasant and quiet suburbs, and therefore believe the whole country must look like their quiet, pleasant suburbs, populated by the same friendly and orderly kind of people. Indeed it is stunning to what extent this group have become totally isolated from evolutions in their own country, to the point that once again we may refer to “the two nations”; the pays réel, so to speak, composed of people who are often confronted with Muslim behavior and simply don’t like what they see, and the pays légal, composed of the estranged upper middle classes and politicians of all parties. I can very well imagine that all warnings about growing Islamic influence in our cities, and eventually in the country as a whole, strikes these people as apocalyptic. Nonetheless, -and this is also an answer to critics of Islam who aren’t very impressed by the Islamic threat and believe a Muslim takeover is impossible- it is very hard to deny the overwhelming evidence, both relating to current affairs and to larger historical patterns, that within the next century Europe will witness, if not an Islamic takeover, at least serious internal tensions that will probably complete the process of decline that set in after the First world war.

Who we are

The Brussels Journal is written by Europeans, living in as well as outside Europe. The Brussels Journal is published by the Society for the Advancement of Freedom in Europe (SAFE), a Swiss non-profit organisation.